Jul 3, 2014

Qualcomm has recently announced it has acquired Wilocity, a company that specializes in advanced Wi-Fi technologies like IEEE 802.11ad, which is referred to as the WiGig.

WiGig takes advantage of the 60GHz band, which is capable of delivering multi-gigabit speeds for mobile devices. As for the current Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard, its implementation can bring about a theoretical bandwidth of 1Gbit/sec. On top of offering greater, better bandwidth, WiGig boasts other several improvements, including better power efficiency and capacity improvements. Qualcomm is expected to start integrating this new advanced standard in its upcoming hardware products, and for now we know for a fact that the Snapdragon 810 will be the first SoC to deliver tri-band connectivity. Qualcomm previously claimed Snapdragon 810 products were expected to ship out in mid-2015, and by now the chip giant has had plenty of time to sprinkle some WiGig on top. Tri-band connectivity adds the classic 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands along with the advanced 60GHz WiGig frequency band.

Qualcomm explains that the integration of the 60GHz band will bring about other benefits, like the capacity to undertake demanding tasks such as 4K video streaming, peer-to-peer content sharing, networking, wireless docking, and making performing back-ups of entire media libraries in mere seconds. Qualcomm is hoping to have products implementing the 60GHz band before competing companies like MediaTek, Samsung, Intel or Broadcom have the chance to jump onboard of the same bandwagon. There's a good chance Qualcomm will manage to meet this goal, because some vendors are still working towards equipping their SoCs with the 5GHz band. Anyway, as good as the 60GHz band might sound on paper, usually there’s a little catch involved. The frequency can’t go through walls or cover extensive distance.

That’s why many skeptics have been wondering if the 60GHz band will ever have a real consumer value? We guess we’ll have to wait and see until the first products equipped with the standard make an appearance on the market. And because we were talking about tri-bands earlier, this is as good a place as any to remind you of the NETGEAR Nighthawk X6 which is the first consumer router to offer this feature. Surely it doesn’t embed the 60GHz band and only takes advantage of a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band and two 5GHz band, thus allowing both older and newer devices to connect to the Wi-Fi. Previous-generation products usually take advantage of the 2.4GHz band, while newer devices like smartphones and tablets will connect to the 5GHz bands.